Adobe Air 2.5 Now Available to Developers

Adobe has used its MAX 2010 conference to announce the availability of its Air 2.5 cross platform development platform.

The platform now supports a wide range of smartphone specific tech such as accelerometers, multi-touch gestures, cameras, microphones, GPS and hardware acceleration – which essentially means that apps created using the platform for smartphones shouldn’t suck.

Air 2.5 will also support Android, Blackberry Tablet OS, and iOS smartphone devices, desktops running Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and even TVs, with Samsung the first manufacturer to ship Adobe AIR compatible sets with its Smart TV line.

Before you get to excited about the Air running on iOS, while this means that developers can build apps for iOS using the Air 2.5 SDK, Adobe itself said on its Labs page that, “we do want to point out that Apple’s restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place”.

The big advantage of AIR running across all these platforms is that developers can re-use existing code across all of them, maintaining look and feel, cutting down on development time, and reducing costs.

Adobe also announced a preview release of Flash builder that enables developers to build Flash apps for mobiles, as well as desktops - though obviously not "that" mobile.

Adobe InMarket was also announced, and will enable developers to distribute their apps to multiple app stores in one hit, without having to target all of the app stores individually. With the number of app stores increasing all the time, this could be a massive time saver. Adobe is asking for a 30 per cent cut of the sales revenue. Early adopters include Intel with its AppUp store and retailers using AppUP include Best Buy in the US and Dixons in the UK.